Thursday, January 25, 2018

Notice of Pierre in the Troy Daily Whig

Following my own advice about searching for "Mellville" led to this one, from the Troy Daily Whig of August 9, 1852. Not transcribed in Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews, ed. Brian Higgins and Hershel Parker, but cited there in the "Checklist of Additional Reviews" on page 452.

New Work by Mellville.

PIERRE OR THE AMBIGUITIES.--This book is by Mellville, the author of Typee, a narrative well known to the public, and a great favorite with a large portion of it. He dedicates his work to "Greylock's most excellent Majesty," that noble old mountain, that bears aloft the heavens on its Atlantian shoulders, and divides midway, Berkshire Co.--a wall of rock between the disjointed spurs of the Green Mountains. WILLARD has the book.

The Troy Daily Whig was then owned and edited by Charles David Brigham (1819-1894) who later became celebrated for Civil War journalism. As discussed by Paul Starobin in Madness Rules the Hour, Brigham reported from Charleston in 1860 for the New York Tribune.

"In 1862 Brigham reported one of the major stories of the war in a twenty-two-page telegram to the Tribune recounting the battle of the ironclads Monitor and Merrimac at Hampton Roads." --Historical Dictionary of War Journalism, ed. Mitchel P. Roth (Greenwood Press, 1997) page 40.

In 1864 as editor of the Pittsburgh Commercial Brigham

made himself famous in the newspaper world by securing news of the battle of the Wilderness twenty-four hours before any other editor. His correspondent hastened from the battle-field on the second day of the engagement, chartered a ferry-boat for $2,700 to carry him to the nearest telegraph station, and telegraphed the details of the conflict before New York newspapers knew that the armies had met. --The National Cyclopaedia of American Biography